• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제6권1호
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• pp.11-19
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• 2014

The focus of this study was to investigate whether there is a position effect on identification accuracy of L2 consonants by Korean listeners and to examine how Korean listeners perceive the phonetic properties of initial and final consonants produced by a Korean learner of English and an English native speaker. Most studies examining L2 learners' perception of L2 sounds have focused on the segmental level but very few studies have examined the role of prosodic position in L2 learners' perception. In the present study, an identification test was conducted for English consonants /p, t, k, f, ɵ, s, ʃ/ in CVC prosodic structures. The results revealed that Korean listeners identified syllable-initial consonants more accurately than syllable-final consonants. The perceptual accuracy in syllable initial consonants may be attributable to the enhanced phonetic properties in the initial consonants. A significant correlation was found between error rates and F2 onset/offset for stops and fricatives, and between perceptual accuracy and RMS burst energy for stops. However, the identification error patterns were found to be different across consonant types and between the different language speakers. In the final position, Korean listeners had difficulty in identifying /p/, /f/, /ɵ/, and /s/ when they were produced by a Korean speaker and showed more errors in /p/, /t/, /f/, /ɵ/, and /s/ when they were spoken by an English native speaker. Comparing to the perception of English consonants spoken by a Korean speaker, greater error rates and diverse error patterns were found in the perception of consonants produced by an English native speaker. The present study provides the evidence that prosodic position plays a crucial role in the perception of L2 segments.

• 한국영어학회지:영어학
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• 제1권3호
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• pp.497-508
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• 2001

This study tested whether non-native speakers approximated native-like locus equation slopes. Russian learners of English acquired native-like values of the locus equation slope for the English bilabial, and English learners of Russian made slight modifications to the locus equation slope of the Russian bilabial. The acquisition of the locus equations occurred gradually with experience. While English speakers, with limited experience with Russian, failed to approximate Russian-typical value of the locus equations slope, Russian speakers, with more extensive experience with English, succeeded in approximating the locus equation for English bilabial. The observation of locus equation transfer effect supports for the locus equation hypothesis as the unit of acquisition over CV-by-CV learning.

• 영어어문교육
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• 제12권2호
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• pp.61-85
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• 2006

The purpose of the present study is to compare Korean EFL learners' speech corpus (i.e. oral productions) with their composition corpus (i.e. written productions). Four college students participated in the study. The composition corpus was collected through a writing assignment, and the speech corpus was gathered by audio-taping their oral presentations. The results of the data analysis indicate that (i) As for error frequency, young adult low-intermediate Korean EFL learners showed high frequency in determiners (mostly, indefinite articles), vocabulary (mostly, semantic errors), and prepositions. The frequency order did not show much difference between the speech corpus and the composition corpus; and (ii) When comparing the oral productions with the written productions, there were not many differences between them in terms of the contents, a style (i.e., colloquial vs. literary), vocabulary selection, and error types and frequency. Therefore, it is assumed that the proficiency in oral presentation of EFL learners at this learning stage heavily depends on how much/how well they are able to write. In other words, EFL learners' writing and speaking skills are closely co-related. It implies that the teacher does not need to separate teaching how to speak from teaching how to write. The teacher may use the same methods or strategies to help the learners improve their English speaking and writing skills. Furthermore, it will be more effective to teach writing before speaking since they have more opportunities to write than speak in the EFL contexts.

• 한국언어정보학회지:언어와정보
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• 제14권1호
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• pp.67-91
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• 2010

Present study examines L1 transfer effect and UG involvement in the acquisition of binding properties of Korean as second language (L2). The study especially investigates i) whether knowledge from different L1s (English and Chinese) affect the interpretation of binding in Korean as L2 and ii) whether L2 learners of Korean differentiate two Korean anaphors like Korean monolinguals do, based on their knowledge of universal form-function correlation of anaphors. 53 post-puberty L2 learners of Korean with English or Chinese L1, together with 30 Korean monolinguals, were tested over Truth Value Judgment Task with stories, composed of Korean sentences representing various types of binding with two Korean reflexives - caki and caki-casin. The results showed some effect of L1 transfer, though not always. Overall, late L2 learners of Korean seem to know the difference between the two anaphors in their properties related to form-function correlation, though their performance level was lower compared to Korean monolinguals. Detailed pattern of the results and the role of UG in the interpretations of Korean reflexives are also discussed.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제13권1호
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• pp.25-36
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• 2021

This study examined the perception and production of eight English fricatives /f/, /v/, /θ/, /ð/, /s/, /z/, /ʃ/, and /ʒ/ by thirty Chinese English majors and thirty Chinese middle school students through a fricative identification test, an intelligibility test, and a goodness rating test and focused on error patterns and the perception-production relationship. The results showed that substitution errors occurred frequently in the perception and production of English fricatives by both the English majors and the middle school students. Further, the error patterns were attributed to various influencing factors such as the negative transfer from Chinese consonant inventory, hypercorrection or overcompensation mistakes, deficiency of L2 teaching, and acoustic similarities. Significant overall correlations were found between the fricative perception and production by the two subject groups but were not manifested in all the eight fricatives, indicating that Chinese learners' perceptual competence of target fricatives was not necessarily tied to their productive excellence of those sounds in all cases. Furthermore, precedences of perception over production were incompletely manifested in the eight fricatives, which suggested that perception might not always be a necessary prerequisite for production. Additionally, subject group and vowel context differences were observed. The English majors performed better than the middle school students, both perceptually and productively, and the subjects' performances in perception and production varied when vowel contexts changed.

• 한국어교육
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• 제29권3호
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• pp.197-225
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to compare the difference in the interactions between beginning language learners and heritage learners on their forms based on the interaction hypothesis. In this study, three types of information gap activities were used to analyze Language Related Episodes (LREs) while investigating the interaction patterns in language use between four pairs (eight learners) of foreign learners and four pairs (eight learners) of English-speaking heritage learners. The result indicated that foreign learners had a high focus on form during interaction. In particular, they had a tendency to focus on vocabulary rather than grammar, and they conducted self-repair by examining and mostly adjusting their speech to postposition and tense. However, in the problem-solving process, they showed a limited ability in interaction, and thus directly asked others to settle the problem or resorted to using English due to their lack of ability to employ various communication strategies. However, heritage learners had a relatively low focus on form compared to foreign learners. Yet, they also focused more on vocabulary rather than grammar and conducted self-repair in interaction, especially for vocabulary. In addition, they were skillful at using various communication strategies such as indirect expressions, use of alternative words, evasion, and delaying, to expand speech and prevent communication breakdown. They focused less on grammar and mostly did not provide negative feedback in interaction.

• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한음성학회 2002년도 3월 학술대회지
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• pp.54-62
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• 2002

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제10권1호
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• pp.15-22
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• 2018

Stressed vowels in English are usually produced using longer duration, higher pitch, and greater intensity than unstressed vowels. However, many English as a foreign language (EFL) learners have difficulty producing English lexical stress because their mother tongues do not have such features. In order to investigate if certain non-native English speakers (Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese-Chinese native speakers) are able to produce English lexical stress in a native-like manner, speech samples were extracted from the L2 learners' corpus known as AESOP (the Asian English Speech cOrpus Project). Sixteen disyllabic words were analyzed in terms of the ratio of duration, pitch, and intensity. The results demonstrate that non-native English speakers are able to produce English stress in a similar way to native English speakers, and all speakers (both native and non-native) show a tendency to use duration as the strongest cue in producing stress. The results also show that the duration ratio of native English speakers was significantly higher than that of non-native speakers, indicating that native speakers produce a bigger difference in duration between stressed and unstressed vowels.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제4권1호
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• pp.3-11
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• 2012

The aim of this paper is to examine the phonetic realizations of English unstressed vowels produced by advanced Korean learners (KLs) of English compared with English native speakers (NSs) focusing on the comparative study of English words and English loanwords. The result shows that KLs are usually not native-like in producing the English unstressed vowel /ə/ and loanword orthography affects the way the KLs produce /?/. The vowel quality of the unstressed vowels produced by the KLs is different from that of the NSs. In duration and pitch, KLs show significantly less difference between the stressed and unstressed vowels than do the NSs. The KLs usually have a high pitch in the stressed and the last syllable while the NSs usually produce peak F0 in the stressed syllable. When the KLs have a similar vowel quality with that of the NSs, they produce a shorter duration of the unstressed vowels. However, there is no correlation between the realization of the pitch and the vowel quality in KLs speech.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제15권3호
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• pp.9-16
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• 2023

The current study investigated the influence of age of L2 acquisition (AOA) and length of residence (LOR) in the L2 setting country on the production of voicing-conditioned vowel duration and spectral qualities in English by Korean learners. The primary aim was to explore the ways in which the language-specific phonetic features are acquired by the age of onset and L2 experience. Analyses of the archived corpus data produced by 45 native speakers of Korean showed that, regardless of AOA or LOR, absolute vowel duration was used as a salient correlate of voicing contrast in English for Korean learners. The accuracy of relative vowel duration was influenced more by onset age than by L2 experience, suggesting that being exposed to English at an early age may benefit the acquisition of temporal dimension. On the other hand, the spectral characteristics of English vowels were more consistently influenced by L2 experience, indicating that immersive experience in the L2 speaking environment are likely to improve the accurate production of vowel quality. The distinct influence of the onset age and L2 experience on the specific phonetic cues in L2 vowel production provides insight into the intricate relationship between the two factors on the manifestation of L2 phonological knowledge.